With No Landmarks, Morality Falls Apart

"You shall not remove your neighbor's landmark, which the men of old have set," Deuteronomy 19:13 states.

Originally, this Mosaic law protected property rights. Landmarks - sometimes they were a simple pile of stones -were like the stakes a surveyor uses to establish a property line.

Our Founding Fathers surrounded us with landmarks -reminders of the moral and spiritual boundaries for conduct that we step over at our peril.

Some in America want to eradicate every vestige of God from public life. Their agenda is a religious cleansing of America -the removal of the ancient landmarks.

But there must be boundaries in order for morality to prevail.

John Adams, the second president of the United States, said: "We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."

Since the tragedy of Sept. 11, we Americans have been throwing God's name around in public.

"God Bless America" has not only been sung in just about every Major League ballpark but the phrase continues to appear on placards in the most unlikely places.

"In God we trust," adopted by Congress in 1956 as our national motto, is another reminder of our Judeo-Christian heritage. It too has cropped up in places other than on our money. And who could forget the furor when the 9th Circuit moved to strike the words "under God" from the Pledge of Allegiance?

Over the summer, the American Family Association (AFA) launched a campaign to place a poster of our national motto, emblazoned in gold on the American flag, in every classroom and public building in America. And the AFA is currently campaigning in favor of a constitutional amendment to keep the phrase in the pledge and to protect "In God we trust" as our national motto.

Perhaps it is time to reconsider the entire God-controversy in light of where we are in 21st century America.

Are we truly one nation under God? Do we really trust in God? Or are we just paying lip service to a platitude? And do we really want God to bless us?

If we are trusting merely in ourselves, why claim we are trusting in God? If we as a nation ignore God in our culture -evidenced by our immoral lifestyles and the laws we pass to facilitate them -then doesn't invoking God's name in these public proclamations amount to hypocrisy?

In America, we permit 4,000 babies to be aborted every day. That's more deaths in 15 days than the total number of highway fatalities in a year.

The concept of the traditional family is threatened by a soaring divorce rate, rampant adultery, pervasive pornography, domestic violence, and homosexual activists. For millennia, Western civilization has defined the traditional family as a husband and a wife -and if God blesses -either through natural procreation or the beauty of adoption, children.

The family was such an important concept to God that he established it immediately after man had been created. The Gospel writer Mark explains: "... From the beginning of the creation, God 'made them male and female.' For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, 'and the two shall become one flesh'" (Mark 10:8 and similar references in Matthew 19:5).

The deaths of multitudes of pre-born children at the hands of doctors who have taken an oath to preserve life coupled with the repeated attempts to destroy the family do not characterize a nation under divine authority.

All the more reason why we need to be surrounded by these public reminders of what made America great. It's unlikely that these reminders will persuade drunks, wife beaters, prostitutes, and others mired in immorality to suddenly repent.

The value in the public acknowledgment of a Supreme Being is largely the point of reference it provides. When drifting in the middle of the ocean, it's impossible to tell how far you've been carried by the currents. These landmarks are reminders of our starting point.

And maybe, just maybe, some of those drunks, wife beaters, and prostitutes will repent after all.

Original date of publication, Thursday October 24, 2002. Reproduced with permission of The Record (Bergen County, NJ).